This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

General Preferences

The first page you come to in Photoshop Preferences relates to the broadest
changes you can make. Photoshop's General Preferences settings determine
how Photoshop displays, hides, or reveals things in the interface. The General
Preferences page is shown in Figure 3.1.
Let's take the tour.

Put your thumb or a paper clip on this page so you can refer to it as we
proceed and illustrate some of the General Preferences choices.

Color Picker

The Color Picker appears when you click on the foreground/background color
swatches on the toolbox. The Preferences dialog box enables you to choose from
two options. We recommend selecting Adobe's Color Picker, shown as item
a in Figure 3.2.

Figure
3.1 On the General Preferences page, you select settings that determine
how elements are displayed in the Photoshop interface.

Why do we recommend Adobe's Color Picker? Because you can configure it
in many different ways, and at least one is sure to fit your work style. In
Figure 3.2, you can see the default
Windows Color Picker and the Macintosh Color Picker. The Macintosh has a more
robust selection of color modes for color choosing, but there is a flaw in its
design: It specifies color components between 0 and 100% in RGB color mode,
whereas Photoshop, most other programs, and Windows use the 0-to-255 increment.
So you need to translate the values (and that meansughmath)
to communicate color specifications to Photoshop users who use Adobe's
Color Picker.

In contrast, Photoshop's Color Picker, as shown in Figure
3.3, supports the mapping of its color field by each component of four color
models (RGB, LAB, CMYK, and HSB). For example, you can click on the S
in the HSB area, and the color field changes its configuration. The Adobe Color
Picker also supports more than a dozen color-matching specifications, including
the legendary PANTONE. So when a client says, "Hobkins, I want the label
on the can to be PANTONE 1485c," you can access the PANTONE collection
of swatches by clicking on Custom in the Adobe Color Picker, typing the PANTONE
number until it appears, and clicking on OK to use this color in an image window...and,
while you're at it, tell the guy your name is not Hobkins.

Figure
3.2 Windows and Macintosh color picking choices are limited and are best
used by applications whose programmers didn't feel like making a program
Color Picker.

Okay, let's leaf back to Figure 3.1
and the General Preferences menu. Or better yet, why not sit in front of your
computer, open Photoshop, press Ctrl()+K, and read along?

Image Interpolation

An easy way to remember what the Image Interpolation setting is all about is
to remember the word interpretation. When you command Photoshop to
stretch or shrink an image, it has to calculate (take a guess atinterpret)
additional pixels to fit into the image, or it must decide which pixels to
remove to make a smaller image.

Whether you are shrinking or stretching an image, it will have some detail
loss because Photoshop has to make an estimate of the number of pixels to add or
remove.

Figure
3.3 Many of your would-be clients will insist on exact color matching. And
no program does it better than Photoshop.

Fortunately, Photoshop (and very few other applications) uses bicubic
"guesstimating" when removing or adding pixels. This is the most
accurate math method for evaluating which pixels go where. bicubic sampling
searches across, up, down, and diagonally to the target pixel that's being
added or deleted. The process then uses a weighted average of pixel colors to
color in the new region if you're shrinking a file, or it creates new
pixels using a weighted average if pixels need to be added to the new image.
This means that if, say, the region of an image is primarily green, you can
expect bicubic sampling to make the region mostly green, with a very minor color
influence from only one or two pixels that are not green.

Bicubic Smoother is typically used when you want to scale an image up, and
bicubic Sharper can be used when scaling an image down (making it smaller).

Your other choices are bilinear (Photoshop looks in only two directions for
neighboring pixel colors) and Nearest Neighbor, which is not an interpolation
method at all. Nearest Neighbor simply puts the neighboring color next to a
pixel when an image is enlarged. Nearest Neighbor is a phenomenally inaccurate
choice for interpolation. However, if you need to increase the size of, for
example, a screen capture of a palette (as we do in this book), Nearest Neighbor
is terrific. The process simply makes the horizontal and vertical dimensions
twice as large, resulting in an image area that's four times larger than
the originalwith no smoothing or averaging or fuzzy text.

To make this fairly lofty concept more "creative-person friendly,"
check out Figure 3.4. This dot has been
resized using the three different choices.

Figure
3.4 Stick with bicubic interpolation. Your new 6000MHz muscle machine with
1GB RAM can handle the calculations in a flash.

History States

The History States setting determines how many steps back in a file (how many
undo times) you can tap into. Each History State requires a hunk of RAM to store
the undo data, so the number of states you enable is a balancing act between how
big a safety net you want and the amount of RAM you have installed on your
computer. The default number of History States is 20. This means that you can
undo the previous 20 commands or tool strokes you made. After you make your 21st
command or stroke, the undo state for the first command or stroke is deleted to
allow room to undo the most current command or tool stroke.

So, even though you would probably like to set this option to a
thousanddon't. If you have 192MB of RAM installed on your
computer (the minimum amount of RAM that Photoshop requires to run), 10 is
probably a reasonable setting for History States. If you have 256MB of RAM (the
amount you really need to run Photoshop so you don't feel as though
you're working underwater), 20 History States is a good figure. If you have
lots and lots of RAM, you can probably bump up the number some. But
whatever number you set for this option, if your system acts sluggish or if
Photoshop pops up a warning that available memory is low, you probably have too
many History States set. Besides, if you plan on making more than 20 mistakes at
a time, you don't belong in Photoshopyou belong in government
work.

Options

Ah, now we come to the Options settings in the GeneralPreferences
dialog box. Some of these options are useful features; others matter not a whit.
Some commands are vestigial organs from a time when a Macintosh Classic or an
i386sx was considered a fast machine.

Please take a look now at the preferences on your monitor; we are going to
have you change some of the defaults:

Export Clipboard. Yes, by all means. Now this means that you must
also "flush" the Clipboard after you've pasted a Photoshop piece
into a different application, because holding anything on the Clipboard takes up
system resources. To perform Clipboard flushing, choose Edit, Purge, Clipboard
from the main menu.

Show Tool Tips. Um, these balloons that pop up when your cursor
lingers over a toolbox icon aren't exactly tips. In other words, the
pop-ups won't tell you nearly as much about a chosen tool as the status bar
will (we recommend that you always have Window, Status Bar checked). What Tool
Tips will do is name the tools on the toolbox for you, provide the
shortcut key, and occasionally tell you what a button is supposed to do on the
Options bar. We recommend leaving Tool Tips on for your first few months working
with PS CS. As you memorize and familiarize, you may find the tips to be a
distraction, so you can turn them off by unchecking the box.

Zoom Resizes Windows. This sounds like a bizarre tabloid headline,
doesn't it? Actually, you can zoom in and out of an image window in many
ways. One of the first ways that experienced, ancient Photoshoppists like myself
used to shortcut the zooming process (without using the toolbox tool) was to
press Ctrl() and then press the plus and minus keys on the numerical
keypad. We recommend that you keep this check box checked because it
doesn't make much sense to zoom into an image and then have to resize the
window. This option is your one-stop shop for image navigation.

Auto-update open documents. If you are in a studio, or even
working remotely over the Internet on a collaborative piece, you want to check
this option. Why? Because PS CS's Workgroup feature enables several people
to work with the same image. This capability is a boon to desktop publishing
professionals because Larry in Seattle can be composing the page while Phil in
Delphia can be color correcting the image. If you don't auto-update the
file, you will not keep current with the revisions going on within your
workgroup. Leave this one checked unless you run a standalone computer.

Show Asian Text Options. There's really no reason for showing
Asian text options unless you or someone you are collaborating with is Chinese,
Japanese, or Korean. When this option is enabled, Asian text options appear on
the Paragraph and Character palettes. Asian characters use a double-byte
character system, whereas English and West European characters are single-byte
in complexity.

Beep When Done. This option causes you to run around the office
making beeping sounds after you've finished an assignment. Onnnnnnly
kidding! Actually, this is another vestigial organ in Photoshop. There was a
time when you would apply a Gaussian blur to a 3MB image, and you had time to go
out for lunch, get a haircut, and have your taxes done. And Photoshop's
beep after a tediously long operation was welcome because it woke you up so that
you could proceed with your editing. I personally have not heard Photoshop beep
ever since processor speed increased to around 500MHz or so. Uncheck this
option, and if you're a fan of beeping, drop your money on the ground at a
drive-through that has a lot of folks behind you who are in a hurry. In addition
to beeping, you'll learn some new words, too.

Dynamic Color Sliders. Check this option. There's no way to
get an accurate idea of the result of mixing colors on the Color palette without
seeing how one component of a color affects the color range of a different
component. This option doesn't slow you down at all, and watching the
sliders change color is kinda fun.

Save Palette Locations. Check this option unless several other
people use your computer at work. With this option selected, the location of
your palettes stays put after closing and rebooting Photoshop. (If other people
use your computer, everyone can use the Window, Workspace, Save Workspace menu
item so that each setup can be quickly accessed.)

Show Font Names in English. Again, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
fonts are unlike your garden variety Georgia TrueType or Type 1 Garamond. If you
want to use double-byte fonts such as these, and you were brought up with the
alphanumeric system of Europe and the U.S., check this option. It'll make
finding the font you need on your machine a lot easier.

Use Shift Key for Tool Switch. This is a safety feature. If you do
not check it, you can make mistakes in choosing tools if you're a keyboard
kinda guy or gal. Unchecked, for example, pressing G will toggle the
Bucket tool with the Gradient tool. Do you want this to happen? If not, check
this option. Then tools assigned to that button will alternate only when you
hold Shift and press G.

TIP

Toolbox shortcut keys My advice is that, when editing in Photoshop CS,
you invest a moment to choose the tool you want to use from the toolbox.
I'm not sold on memorizing toolbox keyboard shortcuts (there are
plenty of other, more productive shortcuts in this program to memorize,
believe me!), and the Use Shift Key for Tool Switch option will not
activate a tool with no shortcut letter next to it in a group. For example,
the only way to get to the Convert Point tool is to hold on the Pen tool until
the flyout does its thing, and then you choose the Convert Point tool.

Use Smart Quotes. This means that you can use smart quotes
from people like Ben Franklin, Samuel Clemens, and John Cleese. Dumb quotes
abound in our times...okay, I'm pulling your leg here. "Smart
quotes" is a PlainTalk phrase for "typographer's quotes" or
"Curly Quotes." If you check this option, the text you create in
Photoshop will look more professional, and you will not have to look up the scan
code (for example, a left typographer's quote in Windows requires that you
remember, and type, 0147 while holding the Alt key). Wotta trial! Thank
you, Adobe, and leave this option checked. (The only exception to this is the
case in which you want to express something in inches. If that's the case,
you need to turn off smart quotes and type the symbol ".)

History Log

History Log is a new and valuable feature if you need to record your edits.
You have the option to save the list of edits in the image file as metadata, as
an external text document, or both. This feature is especially useful in a
training environment (because taking notes is no longer necessary) and in a
collaborative setup when someone else needs to know any edits you have
applied.

Photoshop offers three choices of what exactly to record. Sessions Only
records when Photoshop is opened, when each file is opened and closed, and then
when Photoshop is closed. If you need to track time, you'll love this
option. Concise records the Sessions Only information and the edits listed in
the History palette. Detailed records both the Sessions Only and Concise
information, plus text that appears in the Actions palette.

Reset All Warning Dialogs

The Reset All Warning Dialogs option, the last in the General Preferences
pane, is pretty self-explanatory. Photoshop has some warning dialog boxes, most
of which have to do with color management profiles that you can prevent from
displaying ever again by checking an option on the face of the dialog box. But
if the dialog box never again shows its face, how are you ever going to get a
chance to uncheck the option if you change your mind and want to be warned?

Simple: Press Ctrl()+K and click on the Reset All Warning Dialogs
button at the bottom of the General Preferences dialog box.

And that's the end of the General Preferences settings. Congratulations!
You just finished exploring the longest of the Preferences pages.